The creak of wood,
The groaning waves
Of muffled creeping,
The shades of gothic doom,
Something’s at my door,
my bedroom door
(I am almost asleep).
I can hear the gentle hiss
Of a dying microphone,
The pant of a hungry guard dog,
The quiet violence of humming,
The voices of children
Running across foggy moors,
Whistles skirting the grass
As one of them falls.
I feel the fear
And the longing to melt
into camoflaged dreams,
Something’s at my door,
My bedroom door
(I am almost asleep).
You’re invisible,
A week seems like a lifetime.
Chicken chatters in the pan,
The radio seeps,
All the memories smile.
Even distance has answers,
Thoughts can be golden,
We have journeys of laughter.
This absence gifts us daydreams,
Patience is vital,
We are living for weekends.
Google Voice is the newest update to Grandcentral, a service I’ve used since near its inception. It generates a universal phone number that ties together various services such as all your other phone numbers, voicemail, VOIP, SMS and even your Gmail contacts. It’s seamless, it’s convenient, and I love it. The tech press points out that Google Voice is a direct challenge to other established for-profit services such as eBay’s Skype, Vonage and Comcast. They missed out its effect on one nonprofit, Community Voicemail, that offers free voicemail for nonprofit clients.
In the past, I was responsible for handling the technical side of Community Voicemail for New York City. It’s admirable goal was to provide free voicemail accounts for homeless clients throughout the city. At its peak, we had thousands of voicemail accounts being routed out of the office of the Coalition for the Homeless. Over time, it slowly became a burden as the hardware slowly died and then it was down for weeks when replacement hardware was shipped and installed. And then Grandcentral arrived. You could GIVE your clients free voicemail. When it was bought out by Google, Grandcentral unfortunately stopped giving out new accounts. Community Voicemail got a reprieve.
During my time working with them from 2002-2007, there was never an attempt by Community Voicemail to change their client-server delivery method. There was no attempt to build an open API, widgetize it, integrate it with social networks, indeed there wasn’t even a Web client through which you could provision services. Delivery of software for a nationally unified CVM that wouldn’t require direct provisioning of local telephone numbers by a nonprofit was promised but never delivered. You had to have Cisco equipment on-premises just to even start.
There is no doubt that a lot of good was done by CVM before Grandcentral showed up on the scene. Many clients attested to its usefulness. However, Community Voicemail is made redundant in the face of publicly available free voicemail. Indeed, Grandcentral actually offered homeless people in San Francisco free voicemail just like CVM. In 2006, the writing was on the wall and I counseled the Coalition to shut down the New York CVM service and we did. I’m upset that Grandcentral shut down giving out accounts soon afterwards but the launch of Google Voice today ultimately confirms my intuition about voice telephony. Voice is low-bandwidth and the processing of it is hardly more complicated than say email or even IM. It’s so cheap from a data processing point of view that it will be offered for free. Google Voice is just another milestone to a free voice plan for all.
I think Community Voicemail desperately needs a new raison d’etre and indeed there is room in their mission statement to evolve away from voicemail as their only mode of service:
Community Voice Mail (CVM) helps people living in poverty, transition and homelessness rebuild their lives by connecting them to jobs, housing, information and hope. We do this by customizing and distributing communications technology via a national network of community-based services.
They can’t just be a free voicemail provisioner. They need to attack other issues that social services clients face but would be in the same realm of voicemail. Voicemail was ultimately about keeping data in safekeeping for nonprofit clients. Many social services clients don’t just have voicemail as a problem, they also have data safekeeping issues. In other words, it’s really tough for clients to keep all their documentation straight when they’re homeless. I’ve often thought it would be a good idea for homeless clients to also have a one-stop shop where they can could scan in documents such as wedding, birth and naturalization certificates as well as any other government documents so that any nonprofit they’re working with could print them out. Think of it as a electronic folder that makes it easier for clients to keep track of the work they’re doing with nonprofits. With the advent of EC2 and S3, this could easily be a national service that Community Voicemail could start without a large outlay of money.
It’s clear that nonprofits that work with technology will always face the problem of being made obsolete in the face of larger and better-funded ventures. There’s nothing wrong with simply stepping back and reassessing your mission from time to time in the face of that. I really hope that Community Voicemail takes this post to heart and really look into modifying their programs.
If you’re still using Microsoft Office for most of your documents and spreadsheets it might be worthwhile to take a step back and consider other alternatives. In her Forrester research report, “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: The Microsoft Word Love Story,” analyst Shirley McLeish writes that companies continue to use Microsoft products not out of necessity, but rather out of habit. “Microsoft Office has been a cash cow for them for years,” she says in an interview with IDG, “But what people are finding is they are questioning that investment. It is relatively high next to some other options on the market.” As a result, online office applications are starting to gain traction, especially among small- to medium-sized businesses.
Case in point, here at Floor64, we extensively use Google’s online suite of office applications for many of our business documents. In looking at our business processes, we realized that many of our documents were, in fact, shared living documents, meaning that they were constantly being revised and emailed back and forth between people. So, instead of dealing with the constant annoyance of attachments and versions, we find the sharing feature of online office applications to be incredibly convenient. Sure, for more complicated spreadsheets that need fancy features like pivot tables or macros, Excel is still the first choice, but for the majority of documents that we are working on, the convenience and sharing simplicity of the online office trumps Microsoft most of the time. Also, for documents that ultimately need to be printed, Microsoft Word and the Adobe Creative Suite are much better for formatting. However, even in those cases we still use Google Docs to share and edit content and then transfer the content to the offline applications for formatting.
To keep our company running all on the same schedule, we use Google Calendar. Again, we had considered a Microsoft solution, but when comparing the cost of installing and maintaining our own system to the Google cost (free), it was a pretty easy decision. Google calendar allows us to easily share calendars across our company, and for the few holdouts that prefer to use Microsoft Outlook, Google offers a calendar sync’ing feature.
If you’re looking to create diagrams or flowcharts, Microsoft Visio is not even included in most of the Office Suites. So, what I have been using is an online alternative, Gliffy. Again, with Gliffy, sharing is second-nature, and the price is right: free for most users, and a premium (pay) option with additional features.
Other online office solutions to consider are ThinkFree and Zoho, both of which offer an even richer feature set over Google.
Microsoft Word just passed its silver anniversary last year, which is ancient in terms of software time. While it is certainly a momentous achievement, it’s important to remember that it’s not a marriage, so it’s perfectly fine to take a look around for better alternatives.
The above facts come from a book called fatal Asthma.
It's well known that puffing on cigarettes can eventually leave you out of puff. But why do a quarter of long-term smokers develop serious breathing problems, when others do not? New research published BioMed Central's open access journal Respiratory Research has found that the answers may lie in a smoker's genetics, which affect their chances of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in later life.
US-based researchers Alireza Sadeghnejad, Jill Ohar, Eugene Bleecker and colleagues from the Wake Forest School of Medicine and Saint Louis University, looked at a disintegrin and metalloprotease (ADAM) gene known as ADAM33 in 880 long-term heavy smokers. Located on chromosome 20, ADAM33 has been linked with asthma in previous studies. This new study is unique in comparing long-term smokers with COPD versus a control group of long-term smokers without COPD.
The researchers found five single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – human DNA sequence variations - in ADAM33 that were more frequent in the COPD group than in the group of smokers without COPD. One SNP, known as S1, had a particularly strong link to lung abnormalities. "Functional studies will be needed to evaluate the biologic significance of these polymorphisms in the pathogenesis of COPD," according to the authors.
COPD is characterized by progressive decline in lung function, and encompasses chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Almost 90% of COPD is caused by long-term cigarette smoking, yet only 25% of chronic tobacco smokers will go on to develop COPD.
A large percentage of children and adults suffer from diverse forms of allergy in Britain, children being more susceptible to allergies than adults.
Allergies can give diverse symptoms from more serious ones such as anaphylactic shock, which occurs after eating peanuts to migraines due to dairy products.
Some symptoms can also be less disturbing, so much so that it takes some time for people to even realise they do have an allergy to that substance. These symptoms can range from headaches, fatigue, bloating as well asdepression.
Dairy products, eggs, chocolate, yeast and gluten are the most commonallergy foods, although you cannot be sure these are responsible for your unpleasant symptoms until you have been tested.
There are ways to determine whether you are allergic to certain foods, by purchasing a specially conceived test, which will indicate your allergy levels, it is quite simple to use at home.
It is sent through the mail and all you need to do is prick your fingers for blood samples and follow the instructions, and then send it back, you will have your results after a few days sent to your home.
Some people will be surprised with the results, though you may be convinced you are allergic to some food products, you might be allergic to others you did not suspect.
Once you have found the food you are allergic to, you can plan a diet which excludes these elements, by contacting a nutritionist, you will soon notice the difference and your overall health will benefit from the new regimen.
JSON is a light-weight, language independent format for data interchange. It is especially popular in Ajax (or interactive web browser-based) applications.
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data interchange format. Its design goals were to be textual, minimal, and a subset of JavaScript. It is based on a Programming Language Model rather than a Document, Database, or Ad Hoc Model, so it is particularly effective in exchanging data between applications that are implemented in modern programming languages. It supports two structures: objects (unordered collections of name/value pairs) and arrays (ordered sequences of values). It supports four simple types: strings, numbers, booleans, and null.
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